The Art of

Travel Writing

Tim Neville

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So you want to do some travel writing and

the reasons are probably pretty clear.

It’s fun, right? Especially that travel part.

Someone else pays you to hike the Andes or

to go salsa dancing in Cuba. Out there, your

challenges and rewards meld into one. The globe

grows smaller; your perspectives widen. What’s

not to love?

Anyone seriously considering a career in travel writing probably

knows, however, that it isn’t a vacation. No doubt going to Tahiti beats

going to the office – but once there, successful travel writers don’t sleep

in, order room service, and hit the spa. They don’t crack open the laptop

at a beachside bar to dash out lazy thoughts with an umbrella drink and

call it good. Professional travel writers are successful business owners

there to get a job done.

And what exactly is the “work”? Travel writers need to think of

themselves more like reporters at first. They don’t just order something

adventurous off the menu and post it on Instagram. They corner the chef and

ask thoughtful questions about what inspires her. They stop to read the roadside

signs no one ever reads. They observe and take notes. Most critical of all, travel

writers don’t just bop around a destination. They have a goal and they spend

their trip tackling its obstacles relentlessly. At the end of the day they have more

questions than answers.

Then, of course, the real work begins. They take all of those experiences and

distill the right ones down into sentences that become paragraphs organized into

clear sections full of imagery, dialog and pivot points. They refine and fact check

and write again, over and over, graciously and exactly as a stressed-out editor

orders, until the story reads as smooth as fiction. That’s right, fiction. The facts

must be watertight, without exception, but the best travel writing reads like a

story.

I’ve been a full-time freelance travel writer for about 15 years now, and for

nearly all of them I’ve counted Outside magazine, Men’s Journal, and The New York

Times among my best clients. I’ve skied in North Korea and gone scuba diving in

Fiji. Tomorrow someone might call with a job in Egypt. Along the way I’ve worked

with some of the most respected editors out there who’ve helped me assemble

stories worthy of inclusion in anthologies like The Best American Travel Writing, The

Best American Sports Writing and Best Food Writing. The Society of American Travel

Writers once named me the second-best travel writer of the year. Hey, I’ll take it.

To be clear, I didn’t get to where I am because I’m a great writer oozing natural

Travel writers need to think of themselves more like reporters at first.

Goofing around in

Antarctica

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talent. I’m no Pico Iyer. I’m naturally super curious and that’s helped but

I’m here mostly because I learned how to play the game, to report well

and to write well enough that a patient editor can always make me

better. With each assignment I learn something new about the craft.

Whether the idea is to start a blog or fulfill a dream of writing for

National Geographic, this guide is meant to help you become a better

storyteller. It is by no means a definitive guide but rather a place to

share some of the strategies that have worked for me over the years.

So many excellent writers and editors have taken me under their wings

along the way and so this is also an attempt to repay that debt. I’ll share

their most insightful tips, too. If you have any tips, I’d love to hear them, too.

The focus may be on longform narrative travel writing but many of the ideas

expressed here translate into other types of travel writing too. Editors need

hotel reviews and round-ups of great beaches. They like trends and news. I’ll

touch on the basics of these “service” stories, too, but the bulk of the guide tries

to go deeper. It revolves around how to find a good tale, how to pitch it and how

to write it. The contents form the heart of what I offered the scholarship winners

in Montenegro.

Everyone knows travel writing doesn’t pay so well, at least not in some form of

an exchangeable currency. The cruel twist is that few travel writing assignments

come with a budget big enough for you to even go do the story. We’ll go over

some of the business aspects and the ethical questions you’ll encounter over

funding, too. The juicy commissions that do come with a budget do exist but to

land those you’ll need persistence. That’s beyond anything I can teach. Instead,

I’d like to show you the building blocks you’ll need to give it a go in whatever

capacity you’re up for. I promise it’ll be fun. Shall we begin?

Many of the ideas expressed here translate into other types of travel writing too. W

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Think of the best travel stories you’ve read. Chances are high that you loved it because of how it spoke to you, how the language made you laugh and gasp, or how the author changed your feelings for a place. I can guarantee all of those articles involved action — people doing things, not on whims or out of boredom, but on purpose. Good stories happen because writers make them happen.

To begin, it helps to have an idea for your story, of course, but to find the story

in that idea you need to craft it. At its simplest a story strings together bits of

action that move toward a goal across a setting using characters we want to see

succeed. “France” is not a story. “A guy who makes artisan cheese” is not a story.

“Aruba has the best beaches” isn’t either. Think of it this way: Story is a verb.

To see what I mean, let’s break the pieces down, starting with the most crucial

component 99 percent of the time: the hook. We’ll look

at characters and setting next.

Staying fresh and desirableHooks hit at the very raison d’être of an outlet that might run your story. That’s

because the survival of the media depends on one thing really, and that is being

current and therefore smart and desirable. Your stories need to help the media

accomplish this, which means your ideas need a hook. A hook tells an editor

that of all great places in the world to write about, this one is one story that’s

happening now.

Hooks come in several forms and time-

sensitive ones are often the most compelling.

If a new route to Machu Picchu opens in

June, you have a hook. If you’ll be among the

first Westerners ever to ski in North Korea,

then wow, you’ve got it. Realize though that

“new” is also a somewhat pliable concept. By

that I mean your subject doesn’t have to be

brand-spanking new to have a shot at getting

commissioned. You can give your idea a

veneer of newness with two simple tricks.

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The magic of the “-est”The first is to look for exclusivity and superlatives — the only, the biggest, the least

— and the more interesting those superlatives are, the better. Discovering a village

with stores that stock the most brands of canned corn in the world might tick the

right box but at the end of the day it’s just canned corn. How much can you really

say? On the flip side, take Aniakchak, a national monument in remote southwest

Alaska. Almost no one has ever heard of it, much less been there. Already, that’s

pretty exclusive.

A colleague of mine wanted to write about Aniakchak but he had no hard

hook. No new lodges twinkled on its fringes. No new trails wended through

the wilderness. No new mines threatened the area. To convince his editor to

send him, he turned to exclusivity and superlatives: “the least popular

place to visit in the National Parks System,” he wrote in his pitch, calling

the monument perhaps “the nation’s most spectacular, least-known natural

wonder.” (My emphasis). And by “least” he meant it: Just 12 people had

been to the area the previous year. He then trotted out some exclusivity by

implying that his merry band of explorers would have the “pumpkin-colored

hot springs,” the trails and the rivers all to themselves. He found a guide

who’d been looking for an excuse to check out the place himself. Together

they’d explore this area.

Outside assigned Christopher Solomon the piece and his Baked Alaska

article made Best American Travel Writing. It all came to be because

Solomon could show his editor a “new” take on a place where nothing new

has happened in a long, long time. You can read his pitch here. We’ll get

more into those later.

If a new route to Machu Picchu opens in June, you have a hook.

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Using pivot pointsThe second trick you can use to create a hook is to expand your thinking to search

for pivot points happening now in the life of a place or, ideally, a character. You’ll

then need examples to demonstrate what you say is happening, of course, and

three seems to be the magic number. These “new chapters” unfolding in an age-

old place, as it were, often lead to far more compelling tales. Is a once crummy

town coming back to life with a crop of new restaurants, a cleaned-up beach and

new outfitters offering kayaking tours? Have a raft of lodges popped up in an

otherwise remote place over the past few years, offering access like never before?

The subject may be old — the Kimberley might be the oldest land around — but

the pivot point recasts it in a new light.

Kevin Fedarko used this trick to write about rafting the Grand Canyon, a topic

that’s hardly new. Instead he focused on a central character whose environmental

activism had a profound impact on Colorado River culture. The hero, a river

runner named Martin Litton, was 87 and making what was likely one of his last of

a lifetime of trips through the Grand Canyon by boat. Fedarko’s “Ain’t it Grand,”

which ran in Outside in 2005, should be in the hands of any student wanting to

learn how to do the job well.

In the end, your hook will claim only a handful of words from your final word

count but they’re absolutely critical. Ask yourself, why should we do this story

now? If you can’t answer that, your idea is just one in a million and it won’t get

noticed.

Let’s move on to characters and tension.

The subject may be old but the pivot point recasts it in a new light.

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As far as I know, no fairy tale ever begins, “Once upon a time, nobody did anything at all.” What always follows is a lonely king or a neglected giant and they each seek something even if they aren’t quite sure yet what that is. If story is a verb, then characters are the bearers of those verbs. They give readers a touchpoint from which they can explore whatever world you’re exploring. Their fates keep you reading.

The same works for travel writing, too. In the

best-case scenarios, you’ll have a central figure

to show you what’s so special about whatever

you’re covering. Or maybe that person’s path

through life, as a whole, reveals something deeper

that we all experience when on the road. If you’re

going to write about mountain biking in Colorado,

it helps to have an impassioned guide whose life

changed for the better after spending years of

finding fun paths through an area that she’s now

ready to show you.

In practice, though, finding good characters who are strong enough to carry a

travel story on their own can be tough to find. They’re wonderful folks but they

simply aren’t that interesting from a story perspective or their motives aren’t so

sexy (“It’s a job…”). That’s when travel writers toss themselves into the narrative.

Doing so comes with countless pitfalls so you must use yourself wisely. No one

cares if you eat a hamburger unless that hamburger is the first food you’ve eaten

after a two-week ordeal.

The best way to incorporate yourself into a story is to make the reader care

about you or at least what happens to you. This cuts to the heart of your story’s

narrative engine — the thing that keeps everyone reading. It’s called tension and

without it you don’t have a story.

Tension and billboardsThink of tension this way. If J.K. Rowling had written a story about an average

boy wizard who has a swell time in school, graduates with honors and earns a

respectable desk job for his efforts, we would have never heard of Harry Potter.

We need conflicts with Voldemort, rivalries with Malfoy and a challenging fight

Mountain biking in Colorado Tim Neville

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with a troll in the ladies'

room among countless other

“conflicts” to keep the story

moving. At it’s simplest,

tension is just a character

facing an obstacle while

pursuing a goal, be it the

arduousness of climbing a

mountain or a city full of

Reuben sandwiches in a

zany quest to find the best

one. The manner in which a

character attempts to reach

that goal becomes the character’s mission. Maybe you’ll hike for five days

for up to ten hours a day, crossing mountain streams and climbing glaciers

to reach that summit. Spelling out your character’s goal and offering a

quick overview of how the character plans to reach that goal somewhere

fairly high in the story is critical to establishing the tension any story needs.

Travel writers have it a bit easier in the sense that narrative tension

doesn’t need to be as epic as a Potter-style battle between good and evil

or camaraderie and loneliness. The tension can be as simple as a character, even

you, facing a question: Will you reach your goal? When the New York Times bought

an idea I pitched about fly fishing for a specific type of fish in the Chesapeake Bay

with my dad, my quest was straightforward: To catch a speckled trout. The whole

piece then revolved around my attempts to do that. I lay out my plan high in the

second section — also straightforward — but since this was for a travel section and

not a fishing magazine, I had to expand my goal and mission to incorporation more

than just catching fish. The fishing would serve as a reason to check out the places

I’d visit.

This paragraph serves as a giant sign — a billboard, as writers say — of what’s to

come down the road if the reader sticks with me.

“I wanted to catch fish, yes, but I also wanted to explore the communities from which

I might catch those fish. I wanted to eat fresh oysters at seaside sheds, run my fingers

over tombstones from the American Revolution and sip lemonade on bayside patios.

I picked three regions around the bay with established guides and that might be

interesting culturally, too: one in the west and two in the east. Onancock came first.”

Fortunately, most travel stories come hardwired with tension if you know where

to look. This is travel after all; someone needs to get from A to B and there’s

almost certainly a hellish road or a mountain in the way. As long as there are some

Narrative tension doesn’t need to be as epic as a Potter-style battle between good and evil.

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meaningful (or at least interesting/funny) challenges en route and as long as you

have a satisfying reward at the end, you’re probably good to go. Failure stories

rarely work, but the more doubtful the outcome, the stronger the story will read.

Reward vs REWARDAlso keep in mind that the more the reward

becomes multifaceted to include something

you didn’t set out to find—say, a newfound

heartiness—the more pleased your readers

will be. For my NYT fishing story, which picked

up a Lowell Thomas award, the payoff is richer

than my catching a bunch of speckled trout,

which I did. The more meaningful reward

comes through my father, who grows proud

watching me find joy in something he’s loved

his whole life.

Solomon handles this like a pro in his

Aniakchak story, where his group faces grizzly bears, stinging plants, and

murderous storms on a very difficult through-hike that make you wonder if they’ll

actually make it out. They do, of course, but that’s not really the payoff. Instead, it’s

the perspective shift on daily life and the magic of finding beauty with friends in

an harsh, overlooked place that he earned by overcoming such wild obstacles that

gives the piece its weight. The reward becomes that much richer.

No drama, no problemCharacter quests can be far less dramatic, too. Maybe a character is on a

personal mission to find the best Reuben sandwich or maybe you’re road-tripping

across Iceland looking for hot springs. Neither is super compelling — there’s little

doubt you’ll succeed and no harm if you don’t — but at least it’d push the narrative

along. Following in the footsteps of a famous person can also work as a quest

as long as there’s some reason to follow those footsteps now. Several years ago,

the New York Times ran a story about retracing Mark Twain’s journey through

Nicaragua timed to the 100th anniversary of his death. That’s tidy — a hook and a

quest all in one.

In the end, though, even if you’re the main character, you need to use the

spotlight on yourself sparingly and authentically — no trying to be funny if you

aren’t. The reader also needs to see you earn a reward for your efforts, otherwise,

what’s the point? Most of all you need to remember that a central character in your

story should be the one that has no voice at all and that’s the place itself. You give

it one. To do that, let’s talk about setting.

Fly fishing for spotted sea trout — aka “specks” — in Chesapeake Bay. Courtesy of Scott Neville

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There’s a funny truth in the fact that great narrative travel writing doesn’t necessarily rely upon a spectacular setting itself. A story set in a suburban backyard can be just as good or better than a piece set in Fiji. On a fundamental “how does a story work” level, a tale about viewing polar bears in Canada might not actually differ so greatly from a story about looking for whale sharks in Mexico. Yet in reading either piece, you should walk away with a very different “sense of place.”

Setting is something you must also craft and that means offering details far

deeper than just the name of the place, when it was founded and how many

people live there. “Tirana, the capital of Albania” isn’t a setting. “A surprisingly hip

city of leafy boulevards lined with brightly painted buildings and trendy cafes” is

getting there but it’s telling not showing. Instead, look for ways to slip in active

descriptions of what’s happening around you that show what the place is like.

Setting affects moodTo do that, you need to expand your thinking of “place”. When we talk about

setting we need to go beyond a geographic location and drill down into the

emotional value a place can provide for the story, too. Places make us feel

something and they do that by affecting our characters and the tone of their

quests. If you’re getting your butt kicked on a hike over World War I trails in Italy,

Using your setting

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we should probably see the landscape rear up

into cruel angles, feel rocks crunching under feet

and hear your breathing turn beastly. If you come

across a comfortable patch of wildflowers, let’s

take a moment to lie down and stare at the huge

granite walls before setting out again smelling

of sweat and lavender. Use the setting to make

your readers’ senses kick into gear. Combined

with a paragraph up high in your story with some

hard facts — like where you are, how high the

mountains are, and the name of the trail — you

begin to build your sense of place.

If characters carry the action, then settings — and how you describe

and use them — can help enhance the mood behind those actions. The

same holds true for your story as a whole because the words you give

to settings contribute powerfully toward your overall tone. You must

absolutely orient the reader with some dry geographic details—we’re

20 miles north of Paris; we’re deep in a canyon in Jordan — but take the

time to show her some carefully curated snapshots to plant an imagine in her mind

that brings the place to life.

Is the day’s heat somehow reflecting off the corporate skyscrapers to beat on

a street vendor dragging his cart home after a brutal day of work? Are the clouds

swollen and dark as your boat races back to port? Maybe after a big day on a bike

you’re finally camping — down by the lake, under a cottonwood. When I wrote

about a winter trip to North Korea for Ski magazine, I needed a serious, almost

witchy tone, so right off the bat I mention the cadaver-gray sky, a lifeless river and

ice fishing holes that look like bullet wounds from way up high. Settings are all

about the details.

Setting as a hookThe value of a setting doesn’t always have to be so literary. In fact, you can use

a setting as a hook. Remember how Christopher Solomon landed his Outside

assignment on Aniakchak by turning to the setting’s superlatives — the one of the

most remote, least visited national park properties? His hook was more or less “now

we’re going to go check it out.”

That’s one trick. Just like with characters, finding a pivot point in the area’s

timeline that suggests a new era is about to begin is another. Places on the verge

of a significant change make for dynamic settings, which can make for dynamic

characters. Turning points like those often create a natural tension that’s great for

your story, too. People either like the changes or they don’t. The first piece I ever

wrote for the New York Times involved a deeply depressed, defunct railroad town

I mention the cadaver-gray sky, a lifeless river and ice fishing holes that look like bullet wounds.

Powder day in North Korea

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in coastal Virginia that was about to become the quaint centerpiece

of a massive new leisure resort many times the town’s size. In a story

like that, the tension between what was to come and what already

was might even give your story a subtle theme, if you work it right.

Places can be worthy of a story if those places have a timely aspect

to consider, too. If Star Wars is filming on Skellig Michael again, maybe

there’s a story visiting set-locations in Ireland to do that’s timed to the

movie’s release. You can go to the birthplace of a poet you adore on

the occasion of his birthday and write about the places he loved most.

No matter the situation, when you’re out there, remember to take time

throughout the day to take notes on what’s happening around you so you have the

tools you need later to build your setting appropriately. Sprinkled throughout your

piece, details like those will give your story some depth.

Once you understand your setting, as well as the hook, the characters, and the

mission, it’s time to convince someone to buy your idea. To do that, you need a

pitch. Let’s look at those.

Places can be worthy of a story if those places have a timely aspect to consider.

Walking trail in Skellig Michael, Ireland Tim Neville

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Now you have your idea. You’ve combed through newspapers to find a place navigating an intriguing pivot point or maybe you’ve seen a report about yet another new lodge opening up in the Kimberley. You have some characters and a plan for those characters to accomplish a goal. The setting is full of superlatives. It’s time to make this happen.

Pitch first or write first?One of the biggest mysteries people seem to

harbor about travel writing has to do with the

order of things. Do you go on a trip first and then

try to sell a finished article or do you write only

after you get an assignment to go in the first place?

For years I believed the latter was the only way

to go. Each media outlet has its own needs and

angles and trying to sell them a story I’d already

written felt like walking around the universe with a uniquely shaped peg hoping to

find the right hole. It seemed backwards. Why do that when you could pitch an idea

and let the magazine tell you how it could fit its needs in the first place? In other

words, why write 2,000 words on a sailing journey in Palau when an editor might

want 400 words on “how the sea can change your life.”

I’m not so sure my way is the best way, though. Other writers I know say it

was only by sending an editor a tight, rollicking read that got them noticed and

published in the first place. Still, the advantages of doing a pitch first should be

obvious: With an assignment in hand, you can work more efficiently and, ideally,

with an expense account. If you get nowhere, maybe try sending in a completed

draft anyway. Plenty of others say that works.

The pitchNow that we’ve gone over what makes a good story — having a hook, a dynamic

character on a mission, and a setting, it’s time to put it all together into a pitch

that you can email to an editor. There’s no set way to do a pitch but some universal

truths do apply. It’s a fact that editors don’t have a lot of time, so you’ll need get

to the heart of your story quickly. You need to show that you’re familiar with the

magazine and its audience. Finally, remember that a pitch shows off your idea, not

necessarily your voice, so save your literary muscles for later.

To keep your pitches succinct, think of them as having three main parts: The idea

itself, how you’ll do it, and who you are, though you can play around with the order.

Traveling to the North Korean slopes in Pyongyang Tim Neville

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You want to cover all of this in about 700 words or so and in a way that

gives the editor all the info needed to demonstrate you’ve done your

homework and there’s a good story at hand. At the same time, especially

if you’ve already done the story, you may want to preserve some secrets

to tease the editor into wanting to know more. Longer stories can

require longer pitches, of course, but in general, keeping it short and

tight increases your chances of getting your pitch read.

What’s your story?For the idea itself, trot out your superlatives and your hook. “In July the

largest gathering of hobo-style train-riding fans in the world kicks off, complete

with one-can-meal cook-offs and box car bars.” Perhaps you want to backpack

through the second-most glaciated peaks in Europe after the Alps, crossing

international borders that have only recently opened to hikers. Maybe it’s the

setting itself that’s most compelling as “a national monument that may be the

nation’s most spectacular, least-known natural wonder” and now you have a chance

to go explore it. In any case, your hook needs to be crystal clear. You may also

need to show somewhere in your pitch why your story is different, especially if the

region is getting a lot of coverage already. Read on for an example of that.

What’s your plan?After you’ve laid out your idea, you’ll then want to show how you’ll report it. This is

“the mission” we talked about and any details, especially superlatives or exclusive bits

that you can drop in here, the better. Maybe you’ll plan to spend four nights at the

Hobo Fest with the Grand Master Hobo, a normally reclusive fellow who has agreed

to show you around as he works to make history in his own overlooked world. On

that cross-border hike, are you going to spend a week trudging up to 15 miles a day,

crossing 9,000-foot passes, and punching through meadows where endemic molika

pines grow? Then say it (and notice how I packed that mission with details).

For his Aniakchak story, Solomon laid out the challenges of his mission by

mentioning the three days of whitewater rapids

he’d have to navigate in a tiny raft that he’d

first have to carry on his back for 18 miles over

unmarked trails. He mentions the dozens of grizzly

bears he’ll likely see and the fierce storms that

could thwart the journey. By the time you get

to the end of his pitch you can already feel the

tension. Will he make it out? Who knows! And so

an editor sent him off with several thousands of

dollars in an expense account. To see Solomon’s

Aniakchak pitch, click here.

You may want to preserve some secrets to tease the editor into wanting to know more.

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Who are you? (I’m someone with a different idea who’s familiar with your magazine, for starters.)If you’re pitching an editor you’ve never worked

with, you need to show you understand what the

magazine is about. For the first pitch I ever sent

to Departures for a story about sailing around

Antarctica, I first did a quick internet search to see

what the travel magazine had done on the ancient

Terra Incognita in the past. If I’d found a feature

story published within the last two years — or a

similar story published recently in a rival publication — I probably wouldn’t have

bothered pitching them at all. Instead, I got lucky and found they’d only mentioned

Antarctica very briefly in a round-up that focused on a company called Quark that

offered cruises on a much larger ship.

I quickly used that to my advantage by stating how my trip, on a tiny four-cabin

sailboat, was “THE way” to see the continent since going with “other companies,

like Quark, which you mentioned in a round-up in 2013…means sharing the

solitude with 189 other people.” Translation: You haven’t covered this in a while and

my way is better. I got the assignment and spent nearly two weeks on a dream gig.

Click here to see that pitch.

Lastly, if you don’t know the editor, you should explain who you are and offer

up some clips. If you don’t have any clips you need to get some — any. Write for

your local weekly newspaper. Try to get a piece published online. As a last resort,

point to articles you’ve self-published on your own blog. You need to show the

editor that you’re not a risk and that you can do the job. A simple, “As for me, I’m a

writer based in Oregon who hikes as much as possible and has stories published in

X, Y and Z” should do. I usually include a link to my website that holds some of my

showcase pieces.

Finding the right person to pitchAh, yes, how none of this means a thing if you can’t get your pitch to land on the

right desk! How do you do that?

Many magazines and newspapers have this (perhaps) unspoken policy that if you

can’t use your reporter skills to dig up an editor’s name and email address then you

probably aren’t far along enough in your career to warrant a serious read of your

pitch. It’s a Catch-22, no?

There are some tricks, though. First, you need a name. The best way is to

have another writer introduce you to an editor that person already works with.

Sometimes editors don’t like you doing that so make sure it’s ok first. If you’re just

starting out and don’t know any other writers, look at a magazine’s masthead and

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find out who works there, then start Googling those names. Chances are good

you’ll find a LinkedIn page with a job description like “I edit Dispatches at Outside.”

Sometimes you can find email formulas in press releases. And you can always pick

up the phone and call. Just tell the receptionist you’d like to speak with a news

editor or a travel editor. If they’re busy, ask for an email. If that doesn’t work, keep

trying until you get the person on the phone and then make it quick. “Hey, I’m a

writer in New York and found an idea I’d love to send you. Are you still the travel

editor? Would you mind if I sent you a pitch? What’s your email?”

If all else fails, try to attend some conferences where you’ll likely run into other

writers and editors and can start to build your list of contacts. In many ways, being

a successful travel writer means being great at networking.

Pitching multiple places at onceGenerally, sending your idea to more than one editor at a time isn’t very classy.

I personally think it also makes you look a little desperate. At this stage you’re

playing a sales game so you need to treat your “customer” well. Remember, your

job is to make the publication feel fresh with unique content. Sending ideas for

that content out to competitors doesn’t really do that.

How long you wait to follow up is up to you. I generally hope to hear something

back in a week and it’s usually just an acknowledgement that the editor got the

pitch. A lot of times, editors need to have another editor sign off on the idea, too,

and that means they might only tackle pitches at a once-a-week staff meeting. If

it’s time sensitive, I say so, clearly, while adding that the editor is getting first right

of refusal, but that I’d like to try to sell it elsewhere if it’s not going to work out.

If the silence drags on, I might pick up the phone for one last try. Only after I get

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a definitive no or have no calls returned for long enough will I then send the idea

out again. In most cases, that means recasting the pitch to match that publication’s

tastes. If no one bites at all, I usually move on to the next idea.

What matters here most is that you send off high-quality pitches that show

you’re a professional plugged into a worthy story. Even if your idea goes nowhere,

the editor will be much more likely to consider your next pitch, and the next, and

the next.

Eventually what you hope to happen is for an editor to like your ideas so much

— even if they aren’t assignable — that she’ll call you with a story to chase. Those

moments are the best. When an editor from the luxury magazine Robb Report

called to send me on a 22-day trip tooling along the northwest coast of Australia,

she did so as a sort of consolation prize for her rejecting a fantastic pitch I’d sent

on a new inn-to-inn walking safari in Zambia. There’s no way that would have

happened if I’d fouled her inbox week after week with crappy pitches.

A word on timingMagazines, more so than most newspapers, work months if not years in advance.

The time it takes to get a story edited, flowed onto the page, printed and shipped

means you need to send in pitches for stories that can run about six months from

now. A lot of publications also have editorial calendars that advertisers can use to

time any ads they might like to buy. These can be useful for you too and oftentimes

magazines have no problems sending you their calendars. If National Geographic

Traveler is running a Europe issue in May, time your pitch on that road-trip through

Iceland to land on an editor’s desk sometime in December.

Websites and newspapers can move much more quickly but giving editors time

to review your idea before it goes stale is always key.

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At some point in the pitching process, if all goes well, your assigning editor is going to bring up the question of money. This seems like a good time to talk about the business side of things. Make no mistake, travel writing is a business and you need to treat it as such even if you’re independently wealthy or have other means. Why? Because your reputation — not to mention your editor’s — demands it.

Pay ratesWhen you’re first starting out and you simply need some clips, you can consider

working for free “in exchange for exposure” but that is not a sustainable business

plan. As fun as an Italian wine tasting assignment may be, you can’t pay your bills in

grigio. Even if you can afford to work for nothing, you should still insist on getting

paid. The craft, your time — and the time of every other writer trying to make a go

of it — are worth something.

Each publication has its own rates, with national print magazines generally

paying much more than websites, even if those websites are for national

magazines. The advantage of writing for the web is that the Internet is a much

hungrier beast with a craving for new content that no print publication could

ever satisfy. Writing for websites that allow you to work with an editor is a great

way to get some clips.

For print in North America, editors generally pay by the word though it in

practice it becomes a flat rate. “400 words at $1 a word” means “$400 for a story

that’s right around 400 words.” Websites generally work with flat rates, as do the

Europeans involved in print that I’ve worked for. In some cases an editor may talk

about articles based on character counts, with

spaces. In any case, top magazines in the United

States may pay multiple dollars per word for a

3,000-word story, while websites like Vice might

pay a $500 flat rate for the same piece. European

outlets generally pay much less so I generally try

to resell articles to them with minor adjustments

for added income. In any situation, you should

always ask for a contract and understand the

rights you’re selling, exactly. That’s beyond the

scope of this guide.

The Internet is a much hungrier beast with a craving for new content.

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Expenses, press trips and ethicsAh ha! We’ve reached the death site of many a fantastic idea, which is to say the

cost it takes to realize it. Publications are a business, too, so the more a story will

cost them the harder the commission may come. If you’re lucky and your career

takes off, your editor will ask for a budget breakdown — X for flights, Y for hotels,

Z for food — and you’ll get your hands on an expense account. Typically, you’ll pay

up front. They reimburse you later. I try to put everything story related on a credit

card that earns me frequent flyer miles. That also helps me keep track of expenses,

not only for reimbursement purposes but also for tax reasons.

The unfortunate truth is that many publications simply don’t have an expense

budget for you at all. If that’s the case, you’ll have to do some math to figure

out how much you stand to lose (or earn) and whether you can stomach that. At

first, taking a hit will just be part of breaking in but the idea is to make a profit

after all. That said, there are ways to stretch your dollars and help keep expenses

down.

Press tripsThe most common trick is also ethically the ickiest. Travel

professionals know that having their hotel, their beach, their country

covered by a real writer on a trusted travel site with 2 million unique

visitors a month is the kind of marketing that money cannot buy.

The bang for the buck is so great, in fact, that often it’s in their best

interest to just cover all of your expenses for you. Free flights! Free

five-star hotel! Free gourmet meals! “Come experience what we have

to offer first hand,” the invitations might say.

The truth is that many publications simply don’t have an expense budget for you at all.

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No doubt that sounds dreamy and plenty of travel writers need these “press

trips” to make their careers work. Public relations agencies and tourism boards

find writers and influencers to invite on these junkets or “fam trips” (short for

“familiarization”) by monitoring the media to see who’s writing or posting about

what. If the writer goes on a sponsored trip and does a good job writing about it,

everything can snowball from there. More stories published usually means more

invitations to visit places to look for more stories.

Many publications rely on press trips, too, since they may have legitimate

reasons for covering a place but no budget to send a writer. If a magazine wants

your story but can’t pay your expenses, you first need to know its policy on

writers accepting “assistance” from tourism boards or public relations agencies

or anyone, for that matter. If it’s no issue, then it might be worth getting a “letter

of assignment” from your editor to show those tourism boards or PR firms when

asking for help making the story happen. You’ll have to do some research to find

which agencies represent which places, of course.

Press trips can be win-win situations but they come with one major caveat:

Many of the most respected publications out there do have a problem with

writers accepting freebies and will blacklist you if you try to pull a fast one. Don’t

do that. For those publications, having a writer beholden to no one but the

readers is a matter of maintaining an independent voice, hard-earned authority

and steadfast credibility. If you write an article based on an experience funded

by people who benefit from that article, any favorable coverage will smell like

it was paid for — whether that’s true or not. It’s the appearance that matters.

Fortunately, publications with strict no-free-stuff policies generally offer decent

expense accounts.

Pro tips and the media rateIn worst case scenarios, a publication wants your

story but has no money for expenses and has a

policy against accepting freebies. In cases like

those you basically have a choice: Do the story on

your own (you’re going there anyway!) and hope

the fee gets you closer to breaking even; or try

to find several stories to do while you’re there.

The latter is obviously better. If you can line up

three assignments in, say, France, then you have

drastically tilted the expenses-to-income scale

toward income. Even better, you also have a shot now at getting at least some

things covered. It’s easier to eek $200 out of an editor by saying you’ll be in France

anyway and only need a couple of meals and a hotel bed, than to come at her with

a $2,000 proposal and a request for international flights.

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For me, finding cheap ways to do big stories has been a major key to

staying employed full-time. By finding multiple stories to do in a region

I can often piggyback multiple expense accounts that individually

might not have covered the trip in full. Recently, Outside sent me

to China to report on a winter sports industry story and paid for my

international ticket. With the need for such an expensive flight out of

the way, I could then pitch a relatively inexpensive story on a different

topic from another area in China to Departures. By combining the trips,

my expense reports for each magazine came in under budget.

The most extreme bit of expense engineering I had to do came with

my North Korea story, The Great Pleasure Project. For that one, I had to line up

two assignments with expense accounts, which still didn’t cover the bill even

when combined. To caulk the gap I found a third assignment that came with no

expenses. Instead, I took the hit and dedicated the entirety of that third story fee

to covering the bill.

Another way to keep expenses down is to ask hotels or other service providers

for a media rate, which is basically a discount that also ups the chances of you

having a VIP fruit basket waiting for you in your room. Some outfitters might

be willing to charge you only what it costs them to run the trip. Either way, be

sure your editor is OK with your accepting media rates before you go down that

road. Some publications want you to remain anonymous while you’re out on

assignment. Asking for a media rate not only blows your cover but also creates an

appearance of accepting favors.

Some outfitters might be willing to charge you only what it costs them to run the trip.

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The plane touches down, you grab a taxi and off you go. On the surface it looks just like the start of any other trip you’ve taken but this one is different. You have a job to do.

No matter how many assignments I zip off

on, I’m always anxious and often a little

overwhelmed those first few days. My career

depends on my ability to do the best job I can

do every time, and every time that job seems

daunting — so much to do and so little time! How

do I overcome that? I get to work, that’s how.

One of the biggest mistakes I see aspiring travel

writers make is a failure to respect the work. They

don’t ask questions. They don’t get names. Most

unforgivable of all: They don’t take any notes

whatsoever. Traveling is fun but you’re not traveling now — you’re reporting — so

don’t let yourself get caught up in the sunsets and cocktails. If you’re doing it right,

an assignment should be pretty exhausting. That’s why when people ask me about

my favorite place to vacation I say home.

Let’s take a look at what you need to do on the ground, the gear you should

bring, and how to collect the material you’ll need to give your story the best shot at

landing you another gig.

Pre-trip preparationsThe work begins before you even go with some pre-trip research. If you did your

pitch correctly, you’ve already made some good contacts and have some good

facts at your fingertips. Now is the time to dig in.

First, go back and read much more about the place you’re going. Lonely

Planet and other guidebooks are a good place to start but don’t rely on them for

everything. Instead, set up Google alerts with keywords relevant to your story to

keep abreast of what’s happening. Get a map, a real one, and trace your finger

around your route, looking for mountains, rivers and bays with fun names that

might reveal something about the history of the place. Find a book and read it,

looking for ways to build the context you’ll need to connect your own observations

later. Maybe even call the author and do an interview. Start gathering the goods.

You never know what will come in useful later.

Study the culture, too. Is the place famous for any poets, artists or musicians?

Find their work and use it. We travel writers are crafty thieves, constantly taking

what’s out there, slapping on some new stickers and calling it ours. I don’t mean

Taking notes in Antarctica 2016Courtesy of Moira Le Patourel

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plagiarize! Rather, mine the country’s most famous poems for images

that you can allude to later when talking about, say, a market. Maybe

you can apply the artist’s pointillist style to your descriptions of all the

umbrellas you might find on a crowded beach. If hot rods are cruising

the prado wouldn’t it be nice to mention the local hit blasting from their

radios? A subtle nod to any cultural reference points will go a long way

to making your story sound like you’re in deep and know what you’re

talking about.

In some cases, with complicated stories or assignments with language

barriers or in places where you simply can’t waste a moment figuring out

the local bus system, it may be worth your while to hire a fixer. These

are folks who act as translators and quasi-guides who can help you work more

efficiently. Assignments to China almost always involve my hiring a fixer. Same with

the Middle East. Typically you can find a college student or ask one of your local

contacts for help finding someone. Rates vary of course. Visitor information areas

often have a list of local guides who would be thrilled to take on a client doing

interesting work instead of just another tourist.

Decide if you need travel insurance before you go, too. I often just fold that into

my expenses since magazines will generally balk at paying for you, an independent

contractor, to get a $25,000 medical evacuation flight out of the mountains of

Nepal. (Disclosure: World Nomads paid for this guide but the advice on insurance is

worth considering, regardless)

Gear I take, things I use — a listI try to travel with only carry on if I can — I simply can’t put the job on hold

while waiting for lost luggage. To do that, I love Eagle Creek’s Pack-It system for

condensing soft goods like clothes and organizing harder goods like chargers,

adapters and batteries. Cotopaxi makes a great day pack that stuffs into its own

sack. If you have a lot of electronic equipment, consider bringing along a power

strip with multiple ports that can handle enough volts from the destination sockets

to charge many things at once. Some specifics:

Notebook: The paper kind because you have to

take real notes with real pens (I bring at least five

and a Sharpie). I like smaller Moleskine knock-offs

that fit in my pocket and include a paper pouch

in the back for stashing business cards I gather

along the way. I give each notebook a name and

take a picture of it that I stash in a digital Evernote

project file (more on that later) so I can remember

months afterward what assignment goes with

which notebook. In the front of each notebook I

leave a few blank pages to either create an index

Notebooks from various assignments Tim Neville

I try to travel with only carry on if I can — I simply can’t put the job on hold while waiting for lost luggage.

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— eg, “Louvre, pages 10-25” — or a rough calendar where

I can write short notes about what happened each day. The

calendar works like an index since I start notes for each new

day with the date. That saves me a lot of frustration finding

specific notes from a specific day later on.

Camera: Fortunately most of the outlets I work for hire

professionals to take photos or just use stock images from an

agency. Rarely will I shoot my own stories—at least not for

publication. I do take a ton of photos though. An editor might

need a shot of something specifically mentioned or the local

library might ask me to give a talk about a trip I did. I’m a big

fan of micro 4/3 cameras and lenses for the compact size,

versatility, and performance. I like GoPros, which I use almost

exclusively for shooting wide-angle stills around water. If you

are taking your own pictures, it’s a good idea to shoot in RAW

format so you can better edit the photos later.

Laptop: I bought the smallest, lightest, least fancy MacBook Air for taking on trips.

At home I have a beefier desktop computer with two monitors.

Smart phone: Beyond being useful for email and posting to Instagram, your

phone is also a highly versatile notebook. Use it to take pictures of signs at historic

landmarks, of menus, of the person who sold you the cheese, or of hotel room

so you can reference it all later. I have an international plan with data and often

launch a map app to get a better feel for where we are and the names of stores or

landmarks that we’re passing when driving from place to place. Details like those

make for good setting material. More on that later.

Apps/Software: Beyond apps that translate, show train schedules or help me book

hotel rooms and flights, I have a few others that make travel writing life easier.

Evernote is the one app I can’t believe I ever survived without. It’s basically a

digital filing cabinet that allows you to build dossiers on anything you want. Each

assignment gets its own Evernote notebook that becomes the nerve center of

everything I do. Text files, pictures of menus and informational signs, web clippings,

business cards, stories I’ve found online, my flights, contracts, PDFs of reports I’ll

reference, emails, even typed out phone interviews and the audio recording of

those interviews: it all goes in an Evernote notebook. I back up my physical paper

notebook by taking pictures of the pages (and the cover itself). The premium

Evernote service runs $45 a year but that allows me to sync everything across all of

my devices. Coolest of all, the premium service also opens a search feature that can

hunt for any word that appears in PDFs, text files, even pictures, including pictures

of your hand written notes. Super slick. I can then share that whole notebook

online with any fact checkers hired to double check my work.

A close up of a notebook calendar that serves as a de facto index Tim Neville

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Scapple: mind-mapping software I use mostly at home to make sense

of my notes. More on that later.

Scrivener: sort of like the Photoshop of wordsmiths, Scrivener is a

vastly complex and powerful word editor mostly intended for book or

dissertation writers, but I use it for most of my larger magazine stories.

Unlike Microsoft Word or Pages, Scrivener allows you to create multiple

documents within a single project to help you keep everything organized.

WhatsApp/Viber/WeChat: Find the texting app of choice in the county

you’re visiting and create an account. So much easier to arrange interviews

and keep in touch that way.

Large Zip-loc bag: So sexy! But, hey, it’s useful. I try to take photos of brochures

and any other handouts instead of schlepping them around, but for those print

items worth bring home, I toss them all into a big plastic bag with the name of the

project written across it in permanent ink. Most of it gets recycled as soon as the

story goes to press.

On to reporting.

Find the texting app of choice in the county you’re visiting and create an account. W

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Let’s face it. Travel writing can be insufferable if the places feel shallow, the characters remain 2D and nothing happens beyond you bragging about your holiday. Travel writing is not a recap of everything you did. Self-indulgent riffs are fine on your blog or Instagram feed but good travel writing demands much more. It all starts with great reporting.

Alex Heard, the editorial director at Outside, used to tell me the three things

that make a story read well are details, quotes and pacing. The latter comes

into play when you sit down to write, but many of the details and quotes should

come from your time in the field. Never go anywhere without a pen and a

notebook.

Maybe even two notebooks. Kevin Fedarko, author of the Emerald Mile, uses

one to jot down in-the-moment observations and facts that he can’t easily look

up later, like what the Mongol goat-herder had for breakfast or what his son said

at dinner. The second notebook becomes more of a diary where he can process

his thoughts about the story itself and elaborate on his experiences.

Gathering the good details that will make your piece shine seems simple

enough but it does take practice. Think of yourself as a scientist out collecting

specimens. You’re looking to jot down snippets of conversations you capture and

to use all of your senses to document what’s happening around you. Give specific

names to everything. “Rose is a rose is a rose…” is far more evocative than “Plant

is a plant is a plant.” If you’re on a hike in Patagonia, find out the types of the

grasses that span the bottomlands and the kinds of trees that can survive those

winds. What type of rock is the stone fireplace in the mountain hut made of?

What’s the local word for that juicy pork dish? Take the leash off your curiosity

and ask, ask, ask. It’s your job. The answers you get will be critical for crafting a

vivid tale later.

The art of the interviewWhen my collecting turns to people, I begin each interview with an apology. I

explain how I’ll be asking a ridiculous amount of questions and how some of

them may seem silly. I say how I’ll probably interrupt some answers to ask more

questions. In the end it’ll all come together, I promise. I also offer to fact check

any parts of the story that involve the person I’m interviewing. That’s key. Never

send your story to sources before it’s published, but do go over individual facts

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and summaries of their quotes with them later in the draft. That not

only puts your interview partner at ease but also opens the door for

staying in touch to gather more details later. Of course, it also saves

you the embarrassment of getting something wrong.

Getting people to loosen up and talk starts with you being there

in person. If it’s a complicated or sensitive topic, or I’m on a bumpy

car ride and can’t really take notes, I might record the conversation on my

smartphone with permission. Otherwise, I’m scribbling away in a notebook using

my own version of a shorthand. Either way, you want to think of the interview as

a friendly conversation, not a list of questions you have to burn through. Don’t be

afraid to push your partner a bit, too. Yes, Mr. Keeper opened his coastal inn last

year because he always wanted to live by the sea, but why? Do cities make him

feel claustrophobic? Does the salty air remind him of his grandfather? Generally

people like to think about such questions.

Putting this all together by carefully observing your surroundings is the only

way to collect the scenes you need for your story as well. Look for action. What’s

happening outside while you’re eating clams or interviewing an artist? Listen

for dialog between two or more people that’s colorful or snappy or reveals

something about the place you are, then note what they’re wearing or eating or

the picture they’re sitting under. Is the street wet with rain when you embark on

your quest to find the best Ruben? We’ll talk more about writing scenes later but

for now take a look at how Fedarko uses observational details and dialog in the

opening section of Ain’t It Just Grand to create a mood, show some action, and

set up the rest of the story. He didn’t do that by not taking notes.

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Alan Brown or Allan Braun and other reporting tipsDon’t forget these key points:

Spell names correctly: It’s a real rookie move to get a name wrong. I always

ask my interview partners to spell their names for me as I write it down. I then

flip the notebook around to show them what I wrote to make sure it’s right.

Later, I’ll fact check it all over again.

Circle people’s names anytime you mention them in your notes: This

just makes it easier to find them later as the notebook fills out. It’s also

particularly helpful for finding notes with quotes since I’ll always write down

who said it.

Always find a way to follow up later: Get an email, a mobile number, a

WeChat handle. You’ll need it for fact checking and to ask those questions

you’ll almost certainly forgot to ask. Besides, you never know when a source

might come in handy on another story.

Go back over your notes each night: Writing “blue with rust” all by itself

might make sense when you’re staring at your source’s car but a week later

you may have completely forgotten why you jotted that down. Go back each

night and shore up your notes.

Create some “story techs”: At the end of each trip I’ll use a few pages in one

of my notebooks to summarize the elements I gathered that I’ll need in the

story. What’s the tension? Do I have an opening scene? What might work for

an ending scene? Who are my characters? Key points I need to discuss? From

now on you’ll be building on those.

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The moment of truth! You’ve reported your story, you’ve turned on the computer, cleaned your desk, vacuumed the floor, eaten lunch—twice. It’s so easy to do anything but write. A friend of mine used to say he’d rather slip sharp things under his fingernails than sit down and get words on the page. I’d have to agree.

Maybe the writing comes easy to you but not to me. I become my own worst

critic and spend hours rewriting sentences that I have to cut anyway. Slowly

it all starts to come together to create a deeply gratifying experience, but the

start of that process is always horrendous. I know I’m not alone. Look at how

many books are out there about writing.

Whether you struggle or not, it helps to keep a few things in mind when you

sit down to write. Remember, your story is a process not a product. Aaron Sorkin,

the screenwriter, says that dumping your ideas onto the page and smearing them

around to create a work you send off isn’t writing but finger painting. For every

paragraph that appears in one of my stories there are probably five that lived

before it. Rewriting over and over again is how you make a piece sing.

Every writer does things a bit differently so find a process that work for you.

Here’s how I get it done.

Mind-mappingOnce I have most of the reporting done I need a way to make sense of it all. Some

colleagues like Christopher Solomon will spend a day or two taking notes of his

notes to refresh his memory and highlight key elements to build his story around.

I do something similar but add a visual element that author Dan Koeppel shared

with me.

It’s called mind-mapping, which you may have heard of. It’s just a way to show

how tiny parts of your story relate to a bigger

whole. Any notes that have to do with, say, the

history of the area get lumped together in one

section of the map while any notes on, say, the

bus ride from hell get grouped in another. Across

the top of the map I’ll make a timeline of each

day, looking for key pivot points that I might be

able to build into scenes later. The real magic

happens when you start to see connections. A

note in the bus ride section dovetails nicely with

a bit of history you learned that ties in well with a

Rafting the Green River through Dinosaur National Monument between Colorado and Utah, USA Tim Neville

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quote. The end result is something very close to an visual outline.

I used to pull out a bunch of pens and a large sheet of craft paper

that would cover my desk completely to create the map but now I do it

digitally with a $15 piece of software called Scapple. There are plenty

of other mind-mapping programs to try but I like Scapple because it’s

made by the same folks who make Scrivener and so the two programs

work well together.

If analog is more your style, instead of going to a hobby store to get

your paper, try going down to your local newspaper and ask to buy the

remnants of the huge rolls of blank paper they feed into their presses

to create daily editions. Even if I make a digital map, I’ll still print it out to a desk-

size oeuvre that encapsulates pretty everything I know on the subject.

Using tensionRemember how we talked about how stories all need tension to move them along?

Knowing how to use that tension can make the difference between a noisy mess of

a read and gripping tale.

An overview of a completed, rather large mind-map (top) and a detail from the same document

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Veteran writing coaches like Jon Franklin and

Jack Hart have published excellent books on

how to assemble your story into a rollicking tale

and both Writing for Story and Story Craft are

well worth your time to read. Solomon also likes

Into the Woods by John Yorke. The key thing

to remember, really, is that narratives all have a

unifying form and tension provides the bones.

Franklin does a deep dive into this in Writing For

Story and lays out how each scene needs that

question mark of what will happen next to keep

the reader engaged. Not every scene is a cliffhanger. That’d be exhausting at

best. The tension can be far more subtle. Even Seinfeld, the show about nothing,

was really just a series of scenes that either created, complicated or resolved

tension.

The same could apply to travel writing as long as each moment serves a

purpose. In your quest to find the best Reuben, you get lost walking around, so

you take the time to describe the neighborhood and the snippets of daily life

you happen upon. Then you come around a corner and —whew!—you resolve

the tension and find the street. Or maybe the first Reuben disappoints, so you

use the moment to talk about the early reactions to Reubens when they first

appeared, and then you head off to find the next one. Each scene of relatively

minor tension needs to move the story closer to either resolving or complicating

the greater tension upon which the entire story is built, in this case, hunting for

the best Reuben. Blending your reporting into the action helps keep the pace

clicking along.

StructureSo how do you organize your scenes? In general, think of your story in three

acts with an introduction, a middle and an end. Each section has a job and the

introduction usually requires the most thought (along with your conclusion)

because everything else will hang off of it. In most cases, somewhere in the first

few hundred words the safe bet is to plop the reader down in a place, lay out the

hook (why you’re there), explain your mission (an overview of your “quest”) and

foreshadow any obstacles you might encounter. In longer stories you might just

write a 400-word scene that’s super captivating with lots of dialog and tight action

that brings the reader in like the opening scene of a Bond movie. In later sections

you’ll lay out the hook and quest and explain, often with no tension or scene at all,

exactly why what you just saw is significant.

Packing everything into one opening section is far trickier than it sounds

because you must hit the billboard bits while using a scene that sets a mood and

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introduces your main character. You also need to create and resolve some minor

tension that moves this first section along. Let’s say we’re starting our story out

at a trailhead where everyone is stuffing sleeping bags, tents, food and maybe,

oh, a revolver, into their backpacks for the start of a ten-day hike. Man that pack

is heavy! We might meet a cast of characters. We’ll learn where you’re going, why

(the hook, goal and an overview of how you’ll accomplish it), and get a feel for

the setting—and maybe why you need that pistol. You then want to end

the intro in such a way that it not only resolves whatever minor tension

you’ve created but also makes the reader feel some variation of “ok, here

we go! You’re going to tell me a story!” For the backpacking story you

might do that by hoisting your load and setting off down the trail.

Notice how Kevin Fedarko in Ain’t it Just Grand ends his first section

with him following his main character into a set of rapids. Reading that

story and picking it apart is where I learned this trick in the first place.

That’s a lot of moving parts to get right so let’s break it down a bit.

Where to startFirst, think about the order of things. A chronological telling with context blended

in often works best in travel writing but this is where I also see a lot of aspiring

writers make the mistake of “throat clearing.” A story presumably about exploring

some islands in Indonesia starts off with the writer driving to the airport, checking

in, and getting on the flight. Or a story about cycling in Italy begins with a 300-

word philosophical dump about what it means to ride a bike. Really great writers

like Outside contributing editor Patrick Symmes (see: From the Wonderful People

Who Brought You the Killing Fields) or Tim Cahill (see: Floating the Mighty Free

and Easy) can pull this off but I rarely can. Instead, as my friend and mentor Brad

Wetzler reminds me, you should consider starting with your best beginning, even if

it didn’t happen first.

Brad was the editor at Outside in 1996 who sent Jon Krakauer to climb Mt.

Everest to report what eventually became the bestseller Into Thin Air. Notice how

Krakauer starts the story with an exciting moment on top of the mountain.

We haven’t even climbed it yet and there we are at the summit:

“Straddling the top of the world, one foot in Tibet and the other in Nepal, I cleared the ice from my oxygen mask, hunched a shoulder against the wind, and stared absently at the vast sweep of earth below.”

Starting in the middle like this is called en medias res, which means “in the middle

of things,” and I bet 90 percent of my stories use it. It’s a surefire way to create

tension and capture the reader right off the bat. When using this technique your

You need to create and resolve some minor tension that moves this first section along.

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opening section should still hit many of the key

parts — explaining where you are, the hook, the

quest and how you intend to do it — though

sometimes it’s ok to just let the action unfold

and then explain it all later. With Into Thin Air we

see bad weather rolling in and learn that a lot

of people are about to die. The rest of the work

explains how that came to be. There are few

more potent ways to create tension than to show

your readers Death winding up the scythe, hit

pause and spend the balance of your word count

bringing us back up to that moment.

People dying icy deaths doesn’t generally make for good travel writing but

the technique works the same. For a story I did on sailing around Antarctica for

Departures, my best beginning was actually the very end — a 75-hour crossing of

the violent Drake Passage to get back to civilization. I could start the story in the

final moments of the trip with an opening scene that had our skipper explaining

that a storm was coming and we needed to beat it across the Drake right away. I

explained why we were there, why this trip was different and special than other

Antarctica trips, and who comes on such a voyage. I wrapped up the introductory

scene with us pushing into the Drake with a hint of doom looming in the air. The

rest of the story brought us back up to that moment. I concluded the piece by

resolving the tension: we make it back with only one broken rib (not mine).

The opposite of en medias res, meaning starting at the beginning, is called

ab ovo or “from the egg” though I’ve never actually heard an editor call it that.

But this technique is what Solomon uses in his Baked Alaska piece.

Notice how he starts at the true beginning of his adventure, though, and not

with any throat clearing.

Kayaking in Antarctica Tim Neville

The opposite of en medias res, meaning starting at the beginning, is called ab ovo or “from the egg”.

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Tell me everythingEn medias res works great for straightforward travel tales and is fairly easy to pull

off but it starts to fall apart when you have a story that needs a lot of explaining

right up front. In situations like those you may need to do something a bit more

complicated and use your first section to give a broad overview of your entire story

or to show your main character in a situation that you’ll then spend the rest of the

piece resolving. Your hook, your quest, all of those building blocks may get shoved

into your second section.

For example, Ski magazine wanted a story I

pitched about going to Switzerland to find old-

school masters who could teach me how to make

the perfect fondue, that classic après ski dish. The

mission was simple. I’d travel around Switzerland

collecting ingredients from as close to the source as

I could get, I’d meet the masters who’d help me mix

them, and I’d ski, this being a ski magazine and all.

The tension was equally simple: with the right help,

could my own fondues become something great?

So cheesy, I know, but the thing that saved the

story and made it super fun, in my view, was my main character, a cheesemonger and

vivacious fondue expert named Fred Fischer whom I found before pitching the story.

The best story I had was really Fischer’s story and it had played out long ago. In short,

he’d become kind of famous for his fondue recipes among people really into fondue,

but then his cheese empire began to fall apart through no real fault of his own. I used

my whole first section to tell his back story in a narrative style that takes us through

his rise and fall and then leaves us in the present with the whiff of a comeback about

to happen. Remember the talk about finding people at turning points in their lives

for hooks? Fischer wasn’t really at a turning point — he’d found a solution already —

but by setting the story up in the context of his past I could start the cameras rolling

at a point where my own quest came into play.

Some might say my story, Rites of the Caquelon, stretches the definition of what

counts as travel writing since it isn’t until the third section that we actually do any

traveling. Worse, the entire second section is basically a navel-gazing essay that

explains how I came to meet him through my own obsessions with fondue. But

starting the piece somewhere in the middle, jumping back, explaining him, me, and

everything else might have been disastrous because in the end, it’s just cheese.

Short of having a vat of molten Gruyère about to fall on my head, there just isn’t

much of nail-bitting cliffhanger to keep you interested. Instead, I set the story up

as two narratives about to collide. The rest of the story shows what happens when

they do. It worked better than I’d thought and the story made Best Food Writing, an

anthology of the year’s standout magazine articles about food.

Vallée Blanche in Chamonix, France Tim Neville

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Middles and the accordion of timeThe middle of your story is generally the easiest to write if you’re

using the en medias res or ab ovo techniques mentioned above. Here is where we

cruise along from scene to scene with your best reported bits blended in like ice

in daiquiri. Remember, each mini scene or anecdote needs to have some minor

tension (and a resolution) to help move it along. You need to reach a pass before

sunset. (You do). You explore the city looking for the poet’s grave (you find it). You

take a surf lesson. (You surf).

If you started your first section off with a scene, you may need to start your

second section off with no scene at all but rather with some backstory or other

context about your characters or setting to paint a fuller picture. Be careful

though. You need to keep your pace moving along.

One way to do this is to play with time. As a writer, you can speed it up and

slow it down to linger on important moments or to breeze through points that

don’t need an entire scene to explain. My mentor Brad Wetzler calls this playing

the accordion of time.

Solomon does this well in his Baked Alaska piece. The second section starts

off by slowing time down to take us back to the early exploration of Aniakchak

and to introduce us to a colorful but little-known historical figure that he can

call back to from time to time. After that, the action is straightforward: Our

characters face some tough conditions hiking out of the fog (they overcome

them). Throughout, Solomon slows down time to let his characters speak and

then speeds it up again to give us highlights from that day’s hike that create a

sense of place. We see mist dripping off the barrel of a side arm. We see grizzly

bear tracks and caribou tracks and “wolf tracks that stalk the caribou tracks.”

Stack together a series of scenes like this, each moving you closer to the goal,

and before long you’ll be at your conclusion.

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Here is where we cruise along from scene to scene with your best reported bits blended in.

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The end and what it all meansConclusions in action movies happen quickly. The alien ship explodes.

The detective captures the bad guy or a sympathetic crook pull off a

spectacular heist. Some loose ends might need wrapping up (he gets the

girl!) but in general the tension pops, the pieces settle quickly and the

curtain falls.

The same goes with travel writing. Your final section might be 90

percent a continuation of you middle as we get ever closer to our goal.

Here we can finally resolve the scene you set up in your en medias res

introduction. Your actual conclusion might only be a few paragraphs long.

The purpose of your ending needs to hit a few notes, but the most important

one is that it needs to come to a natural, satisfying conclusion. You finish the

hike or you at long last have your hands on the world’s best Reuben. This is why

failure stories rarely work. Unless you can pick up the pieces and cast it in a more

positive light, never finding the best sandwich or having to bail on your hike can

take all the wind out of your sails.

There are ways around this, though. I once wrote a fishing story for Stonefly

in which the whole tension was “will I catch a fish.” The answer, it turned out,

was no, but I was able to end the story on an upbeat note anyway simply by

cutting the camera off just as a fish grabs my lure. I didn’t land the fish but I don’t

mention that on purpose. Like the last scene of The Sopranos the ending felt

stronger if I left the reader wondering. With my story, I made a bet that readers

had had enough fun with me along the way that they would feel satisfied with

my line going tight but never actually seeing the fish.

Often times you can tie your story back to an image or other element you

mention earlier in the tale. Comedians do this all the time with “callback humor”

but in travel writing it doesn’t need to be funny. For a story I wrote about hiking

the Wild Coast of South Africa, I mention early on how the area is so pretty that

people sometime catch a fever that makes them want to stay. At the end of my

hike, I simply say I felt a fever coming on. Other times I’ll resort to an image that

suggests this particular adventure might be over but there’s still more to do.

For a story I wrote for the New York Times about biking around the Alps on an

electric bike, I thought ending with me having completed the route I set out to do

felt limp. Instead, I left the reader with a scene where I decide to extend my ride

a little bit more. I shift into high gear and rocket off around a bend in the road.

The best endings, though, do something a little more than just deliver you

back to the real world. They not only show you or your characters accomplishing

goal, they also show how you or your characters learned something along the

way and that’s the real reward. They step back for just a second and show how

your quest has revealed something about those big universal themes that bind

us all: love, hope, desire, companionship, fulfillment, finding peace, and so on.

The best endings do something a little more than just deliver you back to the real world. W

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This is a stretch but maybe in your quest for your Reuben you come across

a character whose enthusiasm for the sandwich says something about the

importance of having a passion for something, anything. In my Departures story

about Antarctica, we make it across the Drake, sure, but it’s in watching how the

austere beauty of the place deeply affects another passenger that you sense

the true payoff on a trip like that is coming face to face with something far more

profound than anyone imagined and letting that experience shape who you think

you are.

It’s easy to get carried away, though, so don’t navel gaze unless you can do it

quickly and honestly. Not every story needs a nod to What Does It All Mean so

don’t force it. If you do want to do it, the best place is often the penultimate

paragraph because readers have but one more paragraph to go. They will likely

forgive you for pontificating as long as you don’t linger on it. Again, turning to

Baked Alaska, look at how Solomon handles this. He doesn’t linger on the end but

speeds up time to show us the trip is over but the reward is something greater:

“Mostly what I remember, though, is the feeling of a different rhythm taking

hold, not of the wristwatch but of natural places. Each day as we hike, the sun

sets a little sooner. We see salmon gather in the bays, sniffing for their home

rivers—and see bears come down to the shore, ready to flick their sushi onto the

sand. My fancy GPS watch dies; I don’t much care. I go days without thinking of

e-mail or my iPhone. This is what we want from our Aniakchaks, isn’t it? Places

that help us shake off the dross and find a surer and more ancient pulse.”

After that, a plane comes to get them and — cut! — we’re out.

Cave in Jordan - _Sometimes travel writers

have to squeeze in sleep wherever

they can! Tim Neville

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No doubt if you’re doing it right the writing will be hard at first before slowly getting

easier. Remember that you want to write the first draft of your story realizing it is

just that, a draft. Don’t polish. Don’t get hung up on words. Don’t worry if a scene has

its flaws. Print your story out. Read it out loud. Smooth over those rough bits.

Before hitting send though you need to fact check your story, not just for spelling

and specifics like mountain elevations but also for things that don’t seem so obvious at

first. I once described a street lined with blooming azaleas in a story but a very astute

editor noted that azaleas don’t bloom that time of year. It turns out we were both

right. They’d been genetically engineered, which made for an even stronger detail.

Not every travel story requires all the meta thinking you’ve read about here.

Sometimes your idea doesn’t need tension or characters or some great universal

theme to land it in a magazine. A new lodge opening in a popular park that adds

something new to the experience is often good enough for what editors call a short

FOB item, or “front of the book,” meaning those little hits you see in the first few

pages of a magazine before the big features play out.

But no matter what level of writing your article requires, it does need to

have that all important hook spelled out clearly, and you absolutely must

whip out the notebook and ask some questions. If you’re doing a round-

up of the best beaches in the Caribbean (simply because winter is coming),

you’ll need all manner of details. Is the sand white or black, rocky or smooth?

What trees grow around the beach and what corals lie in the bay? If I have

to hike there, what’s my reward? A cove all to myself? “Service” pieces like

these live or die on the details you gather.

As for the big narrative travel stories that were the focus of this guide,

you need to remember what Aaron Sorkin, the screenwriter, teaches. He

says you don’t have an idea until you can say “but,” “then” or “except.”

Stories are made of turning points and tension. Without them you have an

idea in search of a story.

Travel writing is indeed one of those careers with perks that seem unbelievable

to most. But like any job, it’s a job, too, with real work to do. So don’t be discouraged

if you just can’t seem to land an assignment. Keep at it. Go to the library and read

magazines you’d like to work for. Better yet, don’t just read those stories but study

them. Pick out the parts we’ve discussed here. See how they’re organized. Look at the

details. And keep traveling. Who ever heard of a stay-at-home travel writer?

The greatest thing you can do to help yourself get going is to start thinking

like a writer. Soon you’ll be spotting story elements everywhere. You’ll see the people

you meet in a new light. You’ll naturally find new questions to ask. Hopefully you’ll

stumble upon something surprising that makes a dive deep into a place something you

just have to do.

It’s a wrap! Almost…

Look at the details. And keep traveling. Who ever heard of a stay-at-home travel writer?

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See our other guides

About the Author

Introduction to Travel PhotographyA video guide to getting

started and improving your

photography craft.

Travel Filmmaking FundamentalsVideo tips for planning,

executing and producing

great travel films.

When Tim Neville was 17 years old, he moved

out of his parents’ house and into a tent in the

backyard, where he stayed long enough that his folks

eventually gave away his room. Those five months

in a leaky tent sparked an insatiable curiosity that

has since carried him to more than 70 countries for

countless interviews with tortured folk heroes, wily

schemers, and North Korean skiers.

His articles—from travel sketches to intimate

portraits—are meticulously reported and delivered with telling details, thoughtful

reconstruction, and spirited, often humorous storytelling. A correspondent at Outside

and frequent contributor to The New York Times, Tim has scaled glaciers, scuba-dived,

and cycled hundreds of miles to report his stories.

His work has been reproduced in The Best American Sports Writing, Best American

Travel Writing, and Best Food Writing and in 2015 he was named a travel writer of the year

by the Society of American Travel Writers.

Tim was announced as the World Nomads Travel Writing Scholarship Mentor in 2017,

and his travel writing articles and stories also feature on the World Nomads website.

He lives in Bend, Oregon with his wife and daughter, where he skis Mount Bachelor

as much as he can.

Travel Visual StorytellerVideo tips for starting out

and making it as a travel

visual storyteller.

Gap Year Guide400+ tips, hacks, advice, and

personal stories from our

Nomads to help you plan

your big adventure.

All images from stock libraries unless otherwise credited

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